Monster's Ball Critic Reviews

As for myself, as Leticia rejoined Hank in the last shot of the movie, I was thinking about her as deeply and urgently as about any movie character I can remember.Read the full review

The raw intimacy of some of the scenes -- whether they take place at a diner, in the death house or in the bedroom -- is breathtaking.Read the full review

Hank is but the latest of Thornton's strikingly taciturn characters in a whole string of movies, but for Berry, Leticia represents a big-screen breakthrough.Read the full review

The actors make it unique and unforgettable.Read the full review

The movie holds you in thrall from first frame to last. Hatred is hatred unslaked. So is racism, ugliness, love, lust and sorrow.Read the full review

The movie's stroke of sheer genius is its wondrous ending.Read the full review

This is as anti-Hollywood a film as I have seen in recent months, one which takes conventional plot ideas and uses them not to season a melodrama, but to enrich fully three-dimensional characters and create a forceful motion picture.Read the full review

Burning with a quiet intensity, Monster's Ball is bolstered by a poetic, intelligent sensibility not seen in an American film since Terrence Malick's "The Thin Red Line."Read the full review

The kind of film that could easily be undone by its own high-minded ambitions and dissolve in a pall of uplift. But it stays the course and gives the season two of its notable performances.Read the full review